by Karla Wilson
For decades, the road from the first interview to a full-time paramedic role could easily take years for those entering BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS).
In recent years, the tides have thankfully turned for newer employees. With the help of additional government funding in 2023 that added new resources – both human and ambulances – and new staffing models at ambulance stations across the province, paramedics are now being hired more quickly and in record numbers. They are also able to secure full-time roles at their chosen ambulance stations more often.
Brynn Johnstone applied to work for BCEHS in April 2024 and received an email invite to an interview two days after. Following her interview in early May, she was advised she had passed the interview process. Once Brynn booked her Class 4 driving test and provided medical exam results to BCEHS, she received an official employment offer in late August.
Brynn officially started her new role with BCEHS on September 6 as an Emergency Medical Responder in Revelstoke, B.C – her number one station choice. By mid-September, Johnstone was attending her new employee orientation.
“The hiring process itself was pretty streamlined,” Johnstone says. “The job is super awesome and the station I’m in has been great. Everyone I’ve met so far has been helpful and kind and made the experience so much better.”
New BCEHS employee Brynn Johnstone
Brynn intentionally started her BCEHS career in a part-time role, and her next step is to earn her license to work as a primary care paramedic.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, BCEHS paused its hiring due to following social distancing protocols.
“We quickly fell into a deficit situation because we had stopped hiring for four to six months before we came back online,” says Paul Vallely, long-time paramedic and now Chief, Quality, Planning and Coordination Officer for BCEHS. “That was a major setback – and a number of activities fell out of that.”
These activities included new paramedic positions funded by government, new BCEHS hiring processes, and innovative ways to get paramedics hired into the organization and trained.
“We had to put our foot on the gas pedal to get recruitment started back up. We also needed to triple or quadruple our throughput to catch up,” Vallely says.
In May 2021, BCEHS announced it would hire 600 new full-time paramedic positions across the province and in dispatch. This marked the start of a scheduled-on-call (SOC) staffing model which saw paramedics in dozens of B.C. communities at a station for eight hours per day, and a further 16 hours on call for $2/hour.
In November 2023, the B.C. government announced it would be funding BCEHS to hire an additional 271 new full-time paramedics to serve 60 rural and remote communities. This announcement accompanied the news that BCEHS would be shifting staffing models and phasing out the SOC shift in certain communities, which was stipulated in the 2022-25 collective agreement reached by the employer and the union.
This paramedic hiring and transformation to the new staffing models represented the single largest recruitment of paramedics in BCEHS history, and the SOC transition team was awarded the Leading Human Resource and/or Labour Relations Practices award from the Health Employers Association of BC for their work on this project.
On November 9, 2023 Minister of Health Adrian Dix announced new funding for BCEHS and a change in staffing models for dozens of B.C. communities. BCEHS paramedics and leaders, members of the BCEHS executive team, Parliamentary Secretary Jennifer Rice and Ambulance Paramedics of BC President Jason Jackson were all in attendance.
“When I started to work for the Chief Operations Officer in 2014, I was asked what is needed for BCEHS,” Paul Vallely says. “I said this organization needs to modernize and stop relying on on-call models of staffing. We need to professionalize the service and create regular, full-time jobs across the province. This was honestly my mission in life.”
“Now, I’ve been through two rounds of collective bargaining and championing with the ministry where I’ve advocated for our service. When we implemented the original SOC model, it was the best we could do. But we had to bravely step forward to break the mold on our previous staffing model, which was 50 years old. We’ve finally shifted the paradigm of 60 per cent being on call casual employees – the pendulum has completely swung the other way.”
Chief, Quality, Planning and Coordination Officer Paul Vallely
Manager of Talent Acquisition (TA) for BCEHS Hiba Al-Qishawi says that in addition to the additional paramedic and ambulance resources, the TA team has also changed the way positions are posted in recent years. They now post multiple positions across the province in groups two or three times per year. This reduces churn and allows the TA team to focus on placing employees in their top station picks.
“It now takes paramedics an average of less than one year to obtain full-time status,” Hiba says. “Of course, this depends on multiple factors such as station preferences, but it is a vast improvement from the past.”
The BCEHS Talent Acquisition team has been integral to hiring more paramedics into the system and to clearing the hiring backlog.
“Before, the application process and ability to connect used to take months,” Hiba says. “Just this past summer, it was a seamless process. We are offering a more personal approach, hands-on recruitment and hiring experience with someone dedicated. It’s so much more efficient and faster.”
In the past year, six new employee orientation (NEO) classes have been completed monthly, with 12 new hires per class. These numbers are unprecedented, but the organization is committed not to rest on its laurels. BCEHS continues to implement new strategies to recruit and retain new talent.
“During the COVID pandemic, the whole world slowed down,” says Paul Vallely. “The training schools didn’t produce enough graduates, so we saw a bigger impact. We’ve had to have more NEO classes to support the significant hiring we had to do.”
BCEHS also removed barriers to initial employment and hired hundreds of new ‘driver only’ employees in recent years. These employees were then offered paid training to upgrade their qualifications. To date, more than 400 driver-only hires have received paid training to become emergency medical responders.
Historically, it has also been hard for the organization to have stable staffing in rural and remote areas. Talent Acquisition and a BCEHS Proactive Recruitment Team are also now targeting their recruitment efforts to locals in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities across the province.
BCEHS’ current hiring times and practices are a stark contrast to the past, where it might have taken years for a paramedic to be hired full-time.
Primary Care Paramedic Nicholas (Nic) Hume
After completing his paramedic training and licensing in 2012, it took Nicholas (Nic) Hume, a primary care paramedic at Station 140 in Victoria, seven years to be hired by BCEHS full-time at his desired station. When Nic first applied to work for BCEHS, he was offered a part-time role in Port Renfrew – a two-hour drive from his home in Victoria. For five years, he continued to work part-time at various Vancouver Island-based ambulance stations.
In 2017, Nic was offered a position with full-time hours in Vancouver.
“Then, the full-time positions were based on seniority and the only positions people could get a job at were in Vancouver,” Nic says. “People would then move back from Vancouver to their home stations.”
Nic was offered a full-time job at the Victoria ambulance station in May 2019.
Brian Twaites had a similar experience when joining the organization in 1986.
Advanced Care Paramedic and Public Information Officer Brian Twaites
Brian lived near the University of British Columbia in the Lower Mainland, but because the stations he was interested in only had full-time roles at the time, he couldn’t get in due to a lack of seniority. Brian would commute to Whistler on the weekends and work shifts on-call in Whistler and at other outlying Vancouver stations.
Five years into his employment with BCEHS, Brian earned a full-time role with BCEHS in 1991. He continued his education and training to become an advanced care paramedic, and now works as a paramedic public information officer.
“Starting out in Clinton, I only dreamed and wished I could have a regular job as a paramedic in the community, but I had to leave to go to Vancouver to get a full-time position with BCEHS,” Paul Vallely says. “I call this ‘the great paramedic migration’. You’d get started in some rural, remote isolated place and then more or less everybody had to leave to get a full-time job. But we have flipped this on its head. Paramedics need to have livable wages – which means a regular job.”
Both Nic Hume and Brian Twaites see the recent hiring practices and funding as vast improvements to paramedics entering the system.
“I think we are headed in the right direction,” Brian says. “The direction we’re going and the hiring we’ve done in the past couple of years is amazing.”
As for Chief, Quality, Planning and Coordination Officer Paul Vallely, BCEHS’ hiring transformation has been a milestone accomplishment in his career.
“The previous Chief Operating Officer asked what I wanted to achieve,” he says. “I said it was to see a full-time provincial ambulance service. And we’re there. We’ve done it. It’s a highlight of my career to have helped achieved this.”
BCEHS continues to recruit paramedics through this website.
